Tis the season, I guess.
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As the post title says, the brain is empty today. I could have sworn I had ideas for this post when I got to work today (hmm. Maybe the "idea" was just trying to remember that I should post? That could be), but apparently I don't right now.
Which is bad, because right now is when I'm trying to post.
Well, let's see. I could post something about food, I suppose. There's always something about food, right?
This week's Illustration Friday prompt was dessert, and for whatever reason that caused me to doodle a piece of saskatoon pie in my sketchbook at lunch yesterday. I miss my grandma's saskatoon pie. I'll buy store-bought every once in a blue moon out of craving for saskatoon pie, but it's kind of silly that I do because it'll never really be grandma's pie. Commercial pie crust will never be grandma's pie crust, and the filling will never contain saskatoons that we gathered ourselves (well, duh on both counts there, Dee). Still, at least I can occasionally get saskatoon pie in a store, and since that's the only way I'm likely to get it these days it'll have to do.
I can't make pie, you see. Or maybe I can make pie, but I wouldn't know because I've never made one. That was my grandma's job, you see.
OH HEY. A TOPIC!
For whatever reason, in my mother's family if one person (ok, let's narrow it down a bit to one female person) did something, then the others didn't. I don't know if it was a way to keep from fighting or what, but if one person had a skill no one else went near it. Case in point? My lack of pie-making ability. Grandma made pies, so my mother didn't. I sometimes helped my grandma fill the pies or tarts, but I couldn't tell you the first thing about making a crust (other than what I've seen on the Food Network) because Grandma made them. Oh, and it wasn't just pie crusts. Grandma knitted; Mom crocheted. Mom kind of wanted to knit, but it wasn't until Grandma decided to give up knitting because of her eyesight and arthritis that Mom bought a whole bunch of knitting stuff and started to learn. From a book. You'd think it might have made more sense to get her own mother to teach her, but no. Maybe she thought they'd lose patience with each other? Could be. Anyway, there was no hint of Mom knitting until Grandma stopped.
Kind of weird, yes.
And on a less weird but sadder note, it wasn't long before I inherited all the knitting things after Mom died. Did I knit before then? Um, a little. I taught myself when Mom was learning, but in my case learning from a book made sense because I'm left-handed and my mother wasn't. My knitting career stopped pretty quickly when my first dishcloth turned out better than her first dishcloth, though. She'd misread the instructions, and she seemed so disappointed in the result that I thought it would be easiest just to follow the family tradition of non-competitive hobbies. Even if I don't really understand it.
The thing that kind of bothers me about all of this is that I feel like the whole Mom-Grandma separate interests treaty (A non-competition agreement? You know, that could have been it all along) caused me to lose some family skills. My grandmother was of the generation that originally did home-made out of necessity, but she kept it up for as long as she was able. And while I helped out with small things when Grandma was baking or during canning season, I never did get shown the whole process because it was grandma's job. As a result it died with her, for the most part. And it's sad that if I ever get interested in doing any of those things she used to do, I'll be learning it from a book.
Aaand... just to keep this from ending on a depressing note, I should mention here that my mother made good cookies, and so does her daughter. Because her mother taught her, you see. I guess the non-competition agreement wasn't binding over the third generation...
1 comment:
Of course you know that I am going to have to google Saskatoon pie. Because I am par excellent family pie baker and I want to know what that is. At least your Mom taught you how to make cookies. My Mom would not even let me in the kitchen. My grandma was the pie baker. She would let me watch and help but no lessons. She would give me those scraps she would trim and let me make tarts. I learned I had the skills from watching. It took a while but I have been told my pie crust was almost as good as hers. I'll take it. My Mom could make biscuits and cakes. My Grandma and I could not. It's a weird family thing. My grandma also taught me how to knit.
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